As the pandemic and lockdown measures have caused major shifts in consumer behavior, accelerating the trend towards e-commerce, many WooCommerce-powered stores have seen a significant boost in sales. Major retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target have strained to meet the increase in consumer demand, creating an unprecedented opportunity for independent stores. According to the latest […]
On June 23, Awesome Motive announced it had acquired Smash Balloon, a company that focuses on a family of social feed plugins for WordPress. John Brackett, the founder of Smash Balloon, is now a partner at Awesome Motive through the deal. His entire team will be staying on as part of the larger company. Currently,
Tulsa’s first ever WordCamp, which was scheduled for August 29-30, 2020, has officially been canceled due to uncertainty surrounding the pandemic. The event would have been the second WordCamp in Oklahoma in four years, following WordCamp OKC in 2016. “We were trying to go for a hybrid event that was live streamed and included an
Matt Watson, through his Wholesome Code brand, released a plugin called Wholesome Publishing on the WordPress plugin directory on Tuesday. Version 1.0 of the plugin adds a couple of simple but useful editing features that should help teams of writers or content designers. The plugin allows users to add nested comments on a per-block basis
On Friday, June 26, Gutenberg Times will be holding a live Q&A on block-based themes and full-site editing. The Zoom webinar will begin at 18:00 UTC and last for around one hour, depending on how many questions are asked by viewers. The target audience of the event will be theme developers or anyone interested in
In response to recent events, where American police officers have been charged with murder for the deaths of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, along with the protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement, many repository owners are rejecting the use of the term ‘master’ for the default branch as oppressive terminology. As Git-based repository
Yesterday, core contributor Aaron Jorbin proposed renaming the default “master” branch for all WordPress-owned Git repositories to “main.” The proposal comes among a flurry of related terminology changes that the larger tech community is considering around oppressive language. Based on the ongoing discussion in the comments of the proposal, the term “trunk” has gained popularity,
The University of Wisconsin is offering a free self-paced course on Creating WordPress Websites for students through its Stevens Point branch. It is one of ten free courses offered to the general public in a catalog that includes courses on management, communication, personal finance, customer service, and small business marketing. Creating WordPress websites has become
WebDevStudios released its custom block scaffolding tool to the public on Tuesday. It is a fork of the core WordPress script, which was rolled out in February alongside Gutenberg 7.4. The goal is to allow plugin developers to get started building without all the tedious setup required to build even the most basic block. The
Late last week WordPress made major progress towards the goal of getting users to adopt newer versions of PHP. The ServeHappy API has been updated to set the minimum acceptable PHP version to 7.2, while the WordPress downloads page recommends 7.3 or newer. Sergey Biryukov committed this change on the meta trac after Marius Jensen
The quest for the perfect form plugin is nearly as old as WordPress. Projects have come and gone. There are some great form plugins out there, but far too often the choices are between massive builders that do things their own way and solutions so simple that they do not quite live up to expectations.
Like many tech conferences, OpenJS World 2020 was forced to go virtual for its upcoming event scheduled for June 23-24, in Austin. The global conference was designed to be representative of all 32 projects hosted with the OpenJS Foundation. This includes Node.js, webpack, jQuery, Mocha, ESLint, Lodash, Grunt, and other popular projects. The Foundation is also
The Gutenberg team is currently immersed in bringing full-site editing capabilities to the block editor as part of Phase 2 in the project’s longterm roadmap. Meanwhile, Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella has been experimenting with ideas for the collaboration features coming in Phase 3, which aims to deliver a more intuitive way to co-author content. Today,
Yesterday, the Gutenberg team released version 8.3 of the ongoing plugin behind the block editor. While much of the focus for the team is on the upcoming full-site editing, this update includes several user-facing features, such as a reorganized set of block categories, a parent block selector, a spacing control, and link color options. One
I wish we lived in a world in which we could discuss code each day, not allowing political1 opinions to seep into the discourse. We could talk about the next exciting project around the corner. We could chat about a small startup getting its first big break or new investments into WordPress companies. However, I
Over the past few weeks, I have had the GenerateBlocks plugin sitting in my test environment. I have built a few layouts with it, tinkering with the plugin between other projects. The one thing I kept thinking was that it had huge potential. Aside from a couple of issues, I began enjoying the plugin more
One of the most exciting parts of Matt Mullenweg’s session at WordCamp Europe 2020 Online was the live demo of the new image editing tools that will land in the next release of the Gutenberg plugin. The video is already available on WordPress.tv (and embedded below). At the 8:30 mark, Mullenweg and Matías Ventura, lead
Nick Hamze makes it no secret that he loves the WordPress block system. He has spearheaded several unique blocks on the fun side of things as well as made more practical blocks through his Sorta Brilliant brand. It is his website for funding ideas for the block editor. For his most recent project, he has
WordCamp Europe 2020 Online kicked off yesterday with a record-breaking contributor day. More than 2,500 people signed up to participate. The pandemic may have forced the event to go virtual but an enthusiastic flock of contributors, both seasoned and brand new, joined from their homes to carry on supporting the open source project that connects
On Wednesday, the development team behind Gutenberg dropped version 8.2 of the plugin. The new release focuses on a better editing flow, includes a new content positioning control for the Cover block, and adds categories to block patterns. With this release, users can copy an entire block via the Ctrl + C keyboard shortcut or
